I also detected a grammatical error in your diary's title. There is no month 24; the Gregorian calendar only has 12 months. Perhaps you have been deluded into thinking that other formats are the correct way to write the date. In the future, please write the date the correct American way.

Haha Chris Morris is funny. Been looking for some good WTC satire for a while.

"Operation Infinite Enemy is not a war again Islam, its a war against muslims" - George Bush

HAHAHAHAA ROTFL

"Hosting the film Baftas, Stepehn Fry delivers an unpeakably trite stack of toss urging film makers to 'keep telling stories' in the face of world events - as if films make any fucking difference to anything, least of all the advancement of peace, as if in fact they don't more often promote, through piss like Black Hawk Down, the very surfeit of self-regarding superiority that makes the American West so unpopular in the first place"

And he will do this in the strong intellectual conviction that there is intrinsic value in abhorrent, appalling jokes, if they make people think, and that, as long as you have rigorously analysed the purpose of saying something, there is nothing that cannot be said.
Chris Morris
I could not agree more.

time to give a Newtonian demonstration - of a bullet, its mass and its acceleration.
-- MC Hawking

Even though you are a guest in a strange country, you are at least expected to pick up those customs that make communication least confusing. As a foreign guest on the internet, you are being quite rude by forcing your obsolete metric system of dating on us.

Internet isn't American. TCP/IP maybe is, but HTTP and HTML were developed in CERN. Obsolete concepts like nationality and borders don't belong to the Net, despite of the attempts of lawyer and politician scums to pull them in.

Besides, month/day/year date format is illogical abomination. The two other versions - day/month/year and year/month/day are logically sorting the variables in ascending or descending order. The second version - year first - is what I consider prefered because of sorting.

If you want to be unambiguous, write year as 4-digit number and month as either full name, or its three-letter acronym. Then it is both clear for a human user and parseable for a machine.

The imperial system makes far more sense: A foot is the length of a man's foot. A yard is the distance between the king's nose and his outstretched finger. A pound in weight is equivalent to the quantity of silver required to provide the value of one pound sterling in currency. Is that so hard?

On the other hand, the metric system is unreasonably arcane. A meter is the length of a certain number of wavelengths of some sort of radiation produced by some hideously exacting experimental conditions which no one can be expected to reproduce when all they want to know is how whether or not a bookshelf will fit along their study wall.

A second is defined through some incredibly contrived series of subatomic particle emissions. Having gone to this much trouble to determine the length of a second, it must have come as quite a shock to discover that the metric second was exactly as long as the imperial second. No doubt this is why the metric clock mirrors the imperial clock exactly, having 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds on its dial, rather than 10 hours, equalling 100 minutes and 1000 seconds. Of course, these quantities would be renamed in honor of some famous time-scientist. Kilobakers, Centibakers and Millibakers, perhaps.

Worst of all metric quantities is the kilogram, which the French have defined as being equal to the weight of some hunk of metal which only they have access to. The great lie of the metric world is that their quantities are easily determined, worldwide. In fact, only the French know how much the kilogram weighs, and they have no doubt been using this information to manipulate the markets in precious metals for their own benefit.

Because if your explanation of the Imperial system is accurate then it's based on variables rather than constants.

The Metric system is based on something that DOESN'T change. True, the experiments that yielded the metre were probably rather arcane and the fact that the French keep the kilogram under wraps is a bugger, but all the same I think it's more well-defined and usable.

How on earth do you expect they fitted 1000 metres in a kilonmeter? Its blatently obvious it wouldnt fit naturally so they either squashed the size of a meter or lengthened the size of the kilometer. This causes all sorts of problems - notably that the last hundred meters of a kilometer are considerably larger than the first hundred.

And why have 100 meters in a centmeter when you could just say 0.32 miles? Is decimal arithmetic that difficult?

Don't even get me started on weight - i mean in space a kilogram weighs less than on earth. Doesn't that smack you of stupidity? Why make a system of weights which changes with altitude? Its moronic.<<JUMP! POGO POGO POGO BOUNCE! POGO POGO POGO>>

is that the metric and imperial systems are simply different ways of representing the same thing - mass. Mass remains constant. What varies as an object moves around in a gravitational field is the weight, measured in Newtons, which is mass (in kilograms, which could be converted to pounds and/or ounces if you really wanted to) multiplied by the gravitational field strength where the object is.

You should also note that the metric system is now an international scientific standard - surely you've heard of the SI (Système International) unit system, in which the unit of mass is ALWAYS, without fail, the kilogram, the unit of length is the metre and the unit of temperature is the Kelvin (the unit size being the same as the celcius, except that the zero point is absolute zero rather than the melting/freezng point of water).

Im not talking about mass - im talking about WEIGHT. How can you weigh a brick on the ground and its 2Kilos but 100000 feet up its like 1 Kilo??? Thats just stupid. At least pounds are consistant.

ALso metric is really difficult for arithmetic.
Calculators nad computers use binary while metric is decimal. This means that computers cant represent exact metric ammounts. THats really dumb when you are trying to launch a space rocket and need everything to be accurate.

And why have a temperature system that starts at absolute zero? When the hell would you encounter such a temperature. Much better to use a sensible system that starts at a sensible common threshhold such as the freezing point of water.<<JUMP! POGO POGO POGO BOUNCE! POGO POGO POGO>>

But that isn't really relevant to the problems with metric weight. The site you have given seems to also be heavily pro-metric so I doubt it gives an unbiased view.

I'll admit that weighing things at high altitudes isn't necessary most of the time but still, it is a flaw with the metric system and can't simply be brushed off as a by product of something called mass. Isn't Mass just weight multiplied by 10 anyway?<<JUMP! POGO POGO POGO BOUNCE! POGO POGO POGO>>

Other way round. Weight is mass multiplied by Earth's gravitational field strength at that location. This, at and close to Earth's surface is 9.8 [whatever unit it is]. The value 10 is often used in physics or classical mechanics examinations because it's a time saver and still gives a close approximation of the correct value.

If you were to calculate the weight of an object in geosynchronous orbit at, say, 300 kilometres above Earth, the weight would be different because Earth's gravitational field is lower further away from Earth. But the mass would remain the same.

As I said, kilograms are a mass unit, like pounds. That's why converting between them is as simple as it is. The mass of an object remains constant whatever its location.

Each particle that has mass is attracting other ones; the force is directly proportional to the sum of the masses of both the particles in question, and indirectly proportional to their distance. The resulting vector that we perceive is the sum of all the vectors to all the particles around.

We are commonly used to operate with objects as if all their weight would be located in their center of gravity. For most practical purposes it is enough. But for your example of being inside the object it stops working well. Imagine the Earth as a ball made from little rock. Each the rock attracts the other ones. (We could go further, to the level of the particles, but then it would be harder to imagine.) The perceived gravity vector is sum of all the vectors caused by the individual rocks. This explains ie. the nonhomogenities in Earth's gravity field.

At the geometrical center of an ideal, homogenous ball with no other objects around the ball you would be in weightless state. In the center of real Earth you would feel a bit pressed and a bit hot, and would feel slight gravity force in the direction of some really big mountains, or some geological formation of heavy rock. Plus the vectors caused by the Sun and the Moon, as Tkatchev suggested.

In the metric system, kilograms represent mass while Newtons measure force exerted by mass. In the English scientific system, the unit of mass is a slug. The pound is a force unit just like Newtons. In Earths gravity, a slug of matter will weigh approximately 62 pounds.

The more silly laws, the more perfectly innocent people happen to be criminals.

Pounds to kilograms is simple calculation that can be done from memory if you have more than one brain cell.

As long as a pound is 0.45 kg and a kilogram is 2.2 lb and the scales are reasonably accurate, it's okay with me. I somehow can't understand why some want-to-feel-important suit had to criminalize a fruit merchandizer. My sympathy goes for the Metric Martyr; I feel nothing wrong with his "crime".

With so many inane laws, no one can be sure about his innocence. Maybe it would be easier to ID everyone, establish thorough checks on the borders, put surveillance cameras everywhere, and consider everyone a criminal-until-proven-innocent. Oh, isn't it already done?

However, there are standards for the kilogram in existence, and one resides in the USA.

I agree that the system of physical mass-standards is entirely ridiculous, though. I'm no physicist, but it does not seem to me that it would be so difficult to devise a experimentally determinable standard for mass, for the sake of consistency if nothing else.

Ever consider that the internet isnt owned by the USA? maybe that little thought hasnt passed through your thick head yet but the internet connects this thing called "THE WORLD" new concept, internet = WORLD WIDE WEB, internet doesnt = USA OWNED WEB.

sorry to burst your little sadistic bubble but it had to be done.

Why is th US way the right way!?!? (none / 0) (#57)

by Anonymous Reader on Sat Jun 1st, 2002 at 08:19:14 AM PST

Ummmmm why does the American date format have to be the correct one!?!? And don't give me all the first goverment tripe!
Obviously you are just some redneck with an IQ of 7.......5 if its a really hot day ;)
So why don't you do us all a favour and take your close minded ideals elsewhere!?!?
Hmmmm plus in't it time for your yearly bath? or do you not have a daughter (son) to f*kc

very sensistive skin, asthma and poor vision. Even though I mostly feel strong and healthy, it troubles me when I think of what life would be like for me in a post-apocalyptic world, or at least one without all of our modern amenities.

It's kind of depressing to think of how difficult it would be for me to just survive without help.

I am totally serious. Trust me, when a "post-apocalyptic" situation strikes, the survivors are the ones with the most balanced and stable psyche, not the ones with the bigger body parts.

As an example -- ironically, during times of starvation, usually the obese people die first. Not for any objective reason, but simply because of psychological shock.

P.S. As for asthma -- that, at least, is a purely technogenic ailment. Quite frequently, simply changing your place of habitation will cure it. (i.e. For example, if you have some sort of chronic reaction to some chemical that was used while building your house. This is exactly the case for the appartement block I live in.)

Because, as everyone already knows, it's all about me! Me! Me! Me! The world is as hopelessly fascinated by and enthralled with me as I am. So take your bad eyes somewhere else, Asthma Boy, or else start talking about me.

If you had read my diary you might have seen the connection (!). I was talking about imagining a future where cyborgs were in charge of the world and I was even imagining being a cyborg (in a mature way). So I found it quite nice to have someone post a decent link to real scientific study into cyborgs.<<JUMP! POGO POGO POGO BOUNCE! POGO POGO POGO>>

Obviously you are not describing a Sunday as there are no references to attending church services.

Also, it may benefit you to plant a garden. They require a lot of attention so one will not only cure you of your slothful ways, but the vegetables that grow there will improve your diet measurably. In the process of learning that food does not originate in the aisles of your local grocery store you'll actually turn yourself into a better human being.

He might interpret your phrase about "planting a garden" as a direct invitation to start cultivating the Demon Weed.

--Peace and much love...

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